12:04pm July 19, 2014

On the Topic of Autistic Parents

youneedacat:

myautisticpov:

Just because it seems to be banging around the ActuallyAutistic tag.

My dad is autistic and he is awesome. He is literally the best dad anyone could ever wish for. My NT sister also completely agrees with this, as does my mother. Nobody ever doubts that my dad is a great dad.

My gran is also, most likely, autistic and she raised my dad as a single mother in the 70’s and 80’s. She is also awesome.

Terrible parents are universal, as are good parents. The problem with people with disability is that, if they’re not a good parent, it’s easy to blame the disability. I mean, what else could it be right? It’s not as if non-disabled people are ever bad parents, right? /sarcasm

Having kids has always been something I’ve wanted in the future. Having an autism diagnosis should not make me feel as if that want is now somewhere between difficult and impossible, because I’ve seen it done.

https://web.archive.org/web/20100302131343/http://cap.autistics.org/

I created that website, that unfortunately didn’t go much of anywhere, because the only information on autistic parents out there was run by this self-selecting little group of people who wouldn’t let autistic people into their group, and had self-diagnosed their abusive parents with autism in order to say that autistic people made terrible parents. And they wanted to influence policy and custody decisions, yet claimed to be “just a support group where people vent, so you can’t expect us to be positive”. Can’t have it both ways.

*Sigh* Some people…

I think a lot of this comes down to just how little autism was diagnosed in the past. People like my dad and gran already had kids before they realise that autism =/= Rainman. And, in fact, autism = them.

My dad is 40 and runs a small IT company, where he’s the least visibly autistic one there. If he needs acomodations, he doesn’t need to ask for them, and he won’t be the only one. So, he doesn’t see any point in getting an official diagnosis.

But, like me, the unstructured/group-work heavy nature of uni meant that accomadations would have been helpful back then. Which is why I have a diagnosis.

I think we’re going to see in the future, especially since it’s genetic, more autistic people, who are aware of their autism, becoming parents, just because more people with autism are becoming aware of the fact that they have autism. And that their parents have it. So, if they could do it, why not them? (Apologies for playing the pronoun game a little too much in that last paragraph.)

Also, I want kids and like proving people wrong.

I guess my main concern, personally, for the future is that if I can’t, for any reason, have children of my own, I don’t want to denied the right to adopt.

But hey, it’s a right that I’m going to be more than willing to fight for. And I usually win my fights. ^^

Yeah. I joined that “support group” before they started excluding autistic people, and when I told them about my dad they said “Are you sure he is autistic? He sounds too nice to be autistic.” And another autistic person that joined got asked, “Are you sure you’re autistic? You have so much empathy.” Interestingly, pretty much none of their parents were actually diagnosed, they had “diagnosed” their parents themselves on the basis of the “lack of empathy = abuser” idea.

And I was plenty open about the bad side of having an autistic parent. For instance, chain-reaction meltdowns suck, badly. But mostly I think his failings as a parent had to do with being human, not to do with being autistic. He was a very good parent for the most part. He had faults but so do all parents. I love him very much and the idea they kept acting like autistic people are incapable of love made me so angry.

And when I expressed concern about the way autistic people were being treated in the group, I was told “It’s their right to vent, it’s a support group.” But they weren’t just venting. They were insulting autistic people who were in the group and they were insulting my father – directly, not indirectly. That’s not venting about your own parents, that’s taking it to another level, and they never acknowledged the difference. And now they actually do advocacy to prevent autistic parents from getting custody of their kids in divorces, so this has gone beyond being a support group once you start doing political advocacy like that.

Notes: